Do you have a plan? Most companies spend a considerable amount of time, energy, and money planning what to do and how to do it.

Let’s say you need a website, so you develop a plan, present it to a bunch of website designers, and get quotes or proposals. You’re not going to get caught with your pants down like the last time by some nerdy geek, you know the skinny kid with the scraggly beard, whose techno-babble gave you a headache, or the bizarre young lady dressed in gothic chic with the black lipstick and tattoo to match – yikes, no thanks, not this time, this time you got a plan.

Human Motivational Optimization

You read all the blogs on website design, you know all the ins-and-outs of search engine optimization, and Google Adwords. No one is going to pull a fast one on you. You know your business, your market, and your needs. Or do you?

How much do you really know about how real people interact with your website? How much do you really know about what we call Human Motivational Optimization? All the stats, logs, and number crunching analysis that forms the basis of many website development plans does not truly give you the visceral understanding of how to connect to an audience, and isn’t that what you want your website to do?

So maybe your plan is the wrong plan; it’s like planning a trip to Home Depot to buy a cabbage; it just doesn’t make sense. So how about a plan that does make sense, something simple, understandable, easy to implement, that is if you hire the right people to do it. But before we tell you the four steps to creating your very own Website Branding Plan, let’s talk about Don LaFontaine.

Every Company Needs A Movie Trailer

Chances are you don’t know who the late Don LaFontaine was, but you’ve heard his voice many, many times. Don was the most famous and influential voice behind thousands of movie and television trailers. He had a distinctive deep, gravely voice, and a writing style that reinvented the entire movie trailer format. But why should you care? Simple. Movie trailers are the ultimate elevator pitch, a short memorable performance that compels you to action, kind of like what a mission statement is suppose to do, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning, or rather, the end.

Branding Starts With Thinking Backwards

Most people like to start a project at the beginning and work their way through until they reach the end. Makes sense, or does it? If you don’t start with where you want to end-up, it’s unlikely you’ll ever get where you want to go. Remember our cabbage? Planning a shopping to trip to Home Depot because they got cool stuff, doesn’t help if what you want is a cabbage.

Branding is no different. If you don’t start with how you want your audience to think about you, they will probably never think about you at all. So now that we got that straight let’s start our plan where it makes sense, the end.

The 4 Step Web-Branding Plan

1 – The Slogan

Your slogan, you know the thing that sits underneath your logo, that simple little phrase somebody in your office came up with that makes you sound important, stuff like “the cool air conditioning company.” Most small and medium size companies don’t think too hard about this little marketing gem, and as a result they either have something really cheesy, or some meaningless platitude that has no memorable meaning at all, like “the best people for the best job.”

Just because you’re small and don’t have millions of dollars to spend on television ads promoting your pithy little motto, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have one. That catchphrase is who you are, and how you want people to remember you, short, memorable, and to the point. I remember my sons arguing over some complicated bit of business when one of them in frustration finally said, “Enough already. Give it to me in one word or less!” a demand to articulate what was important without all the peripheral issues; a lesson all businesses should pay attention to.

2 – The Story Line (Logline)

To my mind, mission statements are a totally dysfunctional marketing element, misused and abused by a bean-counter attitude, born out of trying to squeeze every last drop of information into a statement that won’t offend anybody. A wise man once said, “If what you’re saying doesn’t offend somebody, maybe you’re not saying anything” and most mission statements that are full of meaningless platitudes and toned-down amendments, fall into the category of not saying anything, at least, anything worth hearing.

Okay so let’s forget about mission statements, after all this isn’t the military, and we’re not planning the next Desert Storm. Instead let’s think loglines, or what you can think of as your brand story line.

You know those short statements you find in TV Guide, or your weekend television insert, prompting you to watch the next episode of ‘House,’ or ‘Desperate Bimbos.’ They are a short form text version of a trailer, intended to get you to watch the movie or television show. For our purposes, we want people to go to our website, and stay-tuned long enough to get our core marketing message, and not walk out half way through the presentation. So, how do we do that?

The Six Elements of Effective Web Trailers

In order for us to come up with a compelling statement that prompts people to view our website presentation, we need to refer back to our old pal Don LaFontaine. What if Don LaFontaine wrote our website trailer. How would he do it?

Don had a very distinctive style that you’ve heard a thousand times for a thousand different movies, but they all followed a similar format. Each trailer needs to cover six distinct elements, who, what, where, how, why, and when. All the things businesses should be presenting in their elevator pitch, but with one extra ingredient, personality.

Here’s the format used in many movie trailers: “In a place (where), one man (who) brings stability to chaos (what), in an epic tale that will both amaze and inspire (why)! Coming soon (when) to a theatre near you.” Sound familiar?

Let’s take our air conditioning example, you remember, “the cool air conditioning company.” Let’s say our fictitious company is called Kool Air Conditioning, their website trailer might sound something like this:

“In a town where summer heat melts the cool of the coolest homeowners, one air conditioning company comes to the rescue. When the mercury rises to eye-popping, mind numbing numbers, the men from Kool spring into action, bringing relief to the sweltering masses. The Kool Guys will amaze you with their prompt service and installation know-how. The heat is on. It’s coming sooner than you think; it’s coming this summer to your town, your neighborhood; your house. Kool, the cool air conditioning company.”

Over-the-top? Maybe, but we’ve covered all the bases, we know who (Kool), what (air conditioning), when (this summer), where (your house), why (the heat) and how (prompt service and installation know-how). Now that’s a mission statement; one with a little style, panache, and personality; one that will get you remembered and prompt your audience to action.

3 – The Personality

Movies like businesses all fall into certain genres or categories. There’s the action movie format that’s suitable for sports related businesses, the chick flick style that’s ideal for cosmetic or fashion industry businesses, and the family comedy format suitable for entertainment and recreation based companies, and of course the kids movie version perfect for any business selling things for children. The point is that every company and website has to have a personality.

Many hardnosed business executives scoff at the idea of spending money on such seemingly trivial marketing concepts as company personality, but ignoring your website persona, is a big mistake. You can either invest a little in developing, creating, managing, and promoting this personality or you can let the marketplace decide for itself, or worse, find you completely redundant and irrelevant.

4 – The Delivery

You may be asking yourself, this sounds good on paper, but can it really be done, and can it be done for my business, on my website? The answer is damn straight it can. Like most things in life, and in business, it’s not grasping the concept that so hard, it’s implementing it.

With a little investment and a willingness to take some chances, you can be the market leader. But if you thought you could simply take your newly created movie trailer style website elevator pitch and slap it onto your website in text form, you would be mistaken. How you deliver the message is as important, and in many cases more important, than what you say.

Whether you sell lipstick, licorice, or lingerie, you probably have lots of competition, so how you deliver your message is what’s going to make the difference.

You want your website presentation to motivate people to email or phone. You want to deliver a compelling performance that is more than a sales pitch, a presentation that uses voice, visuals, words, and music to create a website personality, a lasting impression; one that is going to allow you to stand out from the crowd and give you a competitive advantage.

Nothing will convince better than seeing an actual example, and guess what, we just happen to be able to provide you with one: check out http://www.SonicPersonality.com and see what an effective website presentation sounds like. If nothing else, you may get a chuckle or two.

About the Author: Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, http://www.sonicpersonality.com, and http://www.136words.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

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After optimizing your site for search engines and pursuing other marketing efforts, it’s time to use the power of the press to boost sales, awareness and credibility cost-effectively. But how do you pitch your story to a reporter?

Here are some quick tips to help you through the media process:

1. Know Your Targeted Media Members.

Before you even reach out to a reporter, you should know what that person writes about and what he or she will be interested in discussing. Do your homework before contacting a specific reporter, and you’ll have a much better understanding of what you should say (and the topics to avoid).

2. Have Talking Points Ready.

With point #1 in mind above, write down all of the benefits your business has to offer. Know why a reporter will be interested in what you have to say, and practice giving your unique story angle. Then, when the time is right, you’ll be ready. (You may even want to have your talking points written on an index card by your phone.)

3. Be Newsworthy.

Try to think of a way that your business fits in with current news and industry events. Develop a story angle related to something newsworthy and current. Then, approach a reporter with your idea.

4. Be Unique.

Media members want fresh, interesting stories. Try to stand out from the crowd and provide your opinion about a current topic, unique statistic or story angle that no one else can offer. By conducting some research and offering something different, you’ll get much farther with your publicity efforts.

5. Be Succinct.

Reporters are on deadline. Get to the point fast. Practice what you are going to say in advance. Then, speak clearly and succinctly. Mention the most important benefits of your story-angle first. Reporters will appreciate your sense of urgency and respect for their time.

6. Know Your Industry.

Become an expert in your field and know the most current news, events and activities within your industry. Share your news with reporters. And soon, they will come to you for the latest industry updates.

7. Offer Expert Advice.

Without pitching your own products and services, introduce yourself as an expert to targeted media members. Comment on a current news item, provide a special report and offer your help with a future article. Reporters will appreciate the fact that you are willing to provide assistance and may add you to their list of resources.

8. Follow-up Accordingly.

Media members are busy people, and you will probably need to make an effort to stay in touch with them. If you are waiting for a pending story or a call back and haven’t heard anything for a few days, feel free to contact the media member directly. Try not to be a pest, but conduct the appropriate follow-up when necessary. This is essential to obtaining clips and maintaining professional, media relationships.

Hopefully, these tips will help you pitch your story to media members and get results. By “thinking like a reporter” and offering beneficial information in a timely fashion, you’ll definitely increase your chances of obtaining some good media coverage that will make a difference on the bottom line.

About the Author: Melanie Rembrandt helps businesses boost sales, awareness and credibility through publicity and online copywriting efforts at Rembrandt Communications®, LLC. For your valuable, free tips and information, visit www.rembrandtwrites.com.

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The content of a website includes everything from the graphical elements of design and the pictures used to the textual website content. All must play its part and converge to create the greatest possible user experience that converts visitors into buyers and profit. However, the most effective website content can also be used to help drive a mass of search engine traffic to any site.

Taking the time to carefully plan and write, or investing the resources to have your web page content professionally written can pay dividends.

SEO

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the act of optimising a website so that it ranks well in the search engine results. The outcome of good optimisation is a steady stream of targeted and active website visitors.

Good SEO content not only needs to appeal to human visitors but to search engines as well, through the inclusion of keywords and semantically or topically related keywords. Happily, the crafting of great quality content can also help to organically build links – another major facet of an SEO campaign.

Conversions

Regardless of whether a visitor arrives on your site from the search results, having clicked on a sponsored ad listing, or has typed in your URL from your business card that you diligently hand out when attending business events, it’s your content that needs to convert them into customers.

Good content can entice people beyond the home page and continue to guide them step by step through the various stages of making a purchase.

Improved Visitor Experience

The more beneficial a visitor finds their time on your site, the more likely they will be to convert to a customer. They will also be more inclined to pass on the details of your business or service and they will be more likely to bookmark or even link to your site. All of these make for effective methods of networking or marketing your online business on the Internet and continuing to add high quality content will not only see your search engine rankings improve but it is likely to improve branding, generate greater sales, and improve customer loyalty.

Greater Chance Of Organic Links

An organic link is one that has been given to you freely by another page or another website based on the quality of the content or the value of the service. In terms of SEO, links are highly valued and the more natural they appear to the search engines and to your human visitors, the more likely that your online business will continue to flourish.

High quality pages that have been written especially for this purpose are referred to as linkbait because they are posted to bait links from other website owners and bloggers.

Improved Website ROI

Your website should be considered an online business rather than simply a site consisting of a few brochure pages. Many websites stand alone with no bricks and mortar businesses to back them up and are hugely successful, although they can also be combined very effectively with high street organisations and enterprises. Every penny you spend on your site, therefore, should be geared towards generating a good return on investment.

If you don’t feel that you’re able to do your website justice or you don’t have the time to write good content regularly then employ the services of professional website content writers. Use a professional service and it will generate a good website ROI.

Convey YOUR Message In YOUR Tone

One aspect of good branding is the use of a uniform tone throughout your communications; especially with potential clients. This continued care can help to win over those that are wavering and will ensure that your business is always well thought of. Business to business and business to consumer narratives may have a different feel to them, but the important thing is that you get the right message across and you do so on a continued basis.

Fewer Bounces

Visitors read website content from the very first word of your page. Even if they skim read, which most readers do when reading from a monitor, care must be taken to ensure that the beginning of the page is as effective at converting as the end of the page is. Hard hitting headlines, informative and entertaining content, and a well written summary should all be crafted with the goal of persuading your visitors to take the next step in your desired chain.

Great Website Content Truly Counts

Powerful website content is sometimes overlooked in favour of web design and online application development. While these are obviously very important factors to the success of your online business, so too is the value and the effectiveness of every inch of your website content.

Combining all of the elements of design, development, and content, along with a powerful marketing mix you can create a profitable website that draws in visitors and then converts them to profitable and loyal customers as well as your greatest marketers.

About the Author: Matt Jackson – WebWiseWords is a professional website content writing that generates positive results for your business. From SEO copywriting to full article marketing packages, WebWiseWords can deliver all of your website content needs and more.

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While written with search engines in mind, SEO content should also consider the end users of your website; your potential customers. Attracting masses of traffic, regardless of how targeted that traffic, is only a portion of the battle.

If the content you’ve used is next to meaningless or smacks of being written solely to rank well in the search engines then your website will under perform and your online business efforts will suffer as a consequence.

Finding the perfect blend between search optimised content and offering an enhanced user experience is critical to better website performance.

Treat Your Business Like A Business

Every website, blog, and other online real estate should be viewed as a business if it is being used to generate an income of any sort. This means that the customer experience is equally as important to your website as it is to your business as a whole.

A good customer experience means more sales, greater conversion rates, improved customer loyalty, and increased customer retention and return business.

Small businesses and bricks and mortar commercial ventures have been living by the ethos that “the customer is always right” for decades and this should go for your online business as well.

Every Word Counts

From the home page to the deeper, product pages, and from your blog to your support forums, the intention of each visible page is to promote your business. Whether you’re trying to ensure that customers continue to return to your service or you intend to attract new customers this means that your website content needs to be set up to sell as well as attract the attention of the search engines.

The CTA (Call To Action)

Decide on your Call To Action (CTA) for each of your pages. Once you’ve done this, don’t simply give visitors the opportunity to follow your CTA but ensure that they’re left with little choice but to do so. Entice them, emote them, but above all ensure that you convert them.

Identify Your CTA

The desired action for each page can differ significantly. On the home page of your site, you are most likely to want to divert customers to the product or services pages where they can learn more information. On the deeper pages, such as product description pages, the desired action is adding the item to the shopping basket or proceeding to checkout; alternatively, it could be to request a quote, make a phone call, or register their details.

Make sure you know what your CTA is before you write the content because if you don’t know then your website visitors certainly won’t.

Stand Out And Stand Apart

At the same time as identifying your CTA, you should also consider your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). This is the single thing that makes your business or your website stand out from every other one in the same industry. Virtually every website has one even though many website owners don’t know about it.

Think about the things that benefit your customers and not those that benefit you. Free shipping, discount on bulk orders, hand made products, a no fuss money back guarantee, or a truly personal service can all be used as effective USPs if they are sold properly.

Website Content That Performs

Website content can do so much more than attract a flurry of visitors to a website, and indeed it should. Yes, traffic is important, because without it, the most effective combination of CTA and USP in the world would bear no relevance but never forget the end user.

About the Author: Matt Jackson – WebWiseWords creates highly effective website content that is designed to help in all of the most important business areas. Visit the WebWiseWords site now to find out how our professional website content writing can improve your online business.

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Copy writing, which is the most fundamental skill in any online business, is an important part of Internet advertising. It is the art of writing sales and marketing materials, which can promote your business on the Web. Being able to learn and master this art can help your business stand out from all the other online businesses of the same type.

The Effect Of Copy writing On Your Online Business

Copy writing can either boost your business into success, or it can run it into the ground, and it can depend greatly on how good your sales copies are. Learning how to use words to properly promote your product or service can generate a great amount of sales for your online business and bring you thousands of members to your mailing list. It can even boost your web site traffic through word of mouth if you write a copy that is intriguing or buzz-worthy.

Effective Copy writing For Your Web Site

Copy writing is effective in online marketing because the words or phrases that you use to entice your targeted audience can be placed on any web site and can be viewed by potential online customers, anywhere, anytime and all the time, as long as they are placed on proper portals that will attract possible customers for a specific product or service.

Keep in mind that internet users are constantly looking for information and solutions for their problems, so you should learn how to communicate directly to your target audience and give them the information that they are looking for.

Know how to captivate them by knowing your visitors’ needs and desires. Talk to your customers, and address their concerns. Remember that you are irrelevant when it comes to enticing people availing of your product or service, so make sure that you focus on them and not on you.

You could have the best product or service in the world, but if you cannot make your audience feel that their life would be better if they owned what you are selling, then, it is of no use. Pull the visitor into the copy, so you can present your product and make your offer.

Make sure that you write from the perspective of your target audience, and not on yours. You can only do this if you understand your target customer, so learn what their motivation is, and apply that to your copy. You can also create a sense of urgency in them, to make them feel the need to click on your link as soon as possible. Create an impression of scarcity through your words, and explain why they need to act now.

However you may choose to approach your target audience, remember that what you need to do is get their attention, so you can make your offer, and you can do this with a good and direct headline. You usually have pre-headlines that set-up your main headlines to attract the attention of the category of prospects that you want to rein in. Let them know what you have so they will know exactly, if you carry what they need. Tell them what your product is by giving them details. And if you think they don’t need it, make them feel so with powerful copy.

Use paragraphs that are friendly by using short sentences and simple words. It is highly suggestible to itemize the benefits of the product, so you can give your visitors a better view of what they are getting. Have plenty of possibilities to make sure that you have at least one unbeatable and unique benefit that can convince a prospect to buy your product or service.

You can also include something extra as a bonus. Make sure that it has value, so people would be more enticed to buy your product or service just to get it.

Aside from the extras, you can also focus on your product or service for enticing your visitors by building-up your product, telling them that the price of the product or service is a good value. Tell them what makes your product unique, and what sets you apart from your competition. You can prove your claims by adding testimonials or sales statistics to your copy.

Making your words sell through your sales letters is guaranteed to increase your conversion rate.

Powerful Copy writing And Search Engines

Since there are over billions of individual pages on the Internet, getting your potential customer to find you in cyberspace is not easy; but with the help of search engines, they are provided a means of doing just that. Learn how to manage search engines to boost your web site’s traffic, and increase the rate of conversion of your online business.

Effective and concise search engine copy writing can dramatically increase your web site’s targeted traffic, and you can do this by optimizing its use. When using search engines, you need to make sure that you are using keyword phrases that will bring specific traffic to your web site.

Analyze your competition and check what type of keyword phrases are being used most often, to give yourself a better chance of increasing your web site hits. Make sure that your targeted keywords are found in your file names, title, headline, and description tags, as well as your web site content.

Copy writing is a fundamental skill in online businesses. Because the Internet is primarily a visual medium, you need to come up with copy that makes your page stand out over the millions of similar pages online. Keep your copy short, concise, and meaningful. Most of all, make it hypnotic.

Remember that having the best product in the market is not enough since you also need to learn how to motivate your audience to buy it. Fifty percent of successful sales depends on powerful copywriting. Make yours count.

About the Author: Jeremy Gislason – Want to launch, reinvent & grow your online biz dramatically? Discover a breakthrough membership site considered as the #1 source of supply for most hot-selling digital information products on the web. Go to http://www.surefirewealth.com and skyrocket your profits now!

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Do you really need a brand?

Do you need to develop a brand identity?

If you want sustainable growth in your business and if you want to earn more than what you do today, you must develop a brand identity for you or your business. There is no alternative to this proposition.

At this point, many business owners will step back saying that branding means advertising and thus it would require huge investment. This is a very common situation as a beginner: The business owner do not have much idea about the actual rate of advertising in different media.

What is the basic relationship between advertisement and branding?

For effective branding of your product or company, you must hit the target market with your brand identity, repeatedly. You must make sure that they remember your face (business face) at least when they need you the most. Thus, to achieve this, marketers use advertisement in different formats, such as audio, audio visual or only visual.

Does it mean that you need to invest a huge amount of money in advertising?

It is not necessarily so. To put it simply, advertising cost depends on the size of your target market and the best medium to reach them. You do not necessarily need to invest in expensive billboards or in a full-page newspaper advertisement to reach the target market.

You can easily find some alternatives to reach it. For example, think about branded office stationary gifts, email advertising, mobile advertising or even social media networking. If you think, you can also use your existing subscribers or clients to promote your business and your brand. For example, think about shopping bags and packaging. These advertising media will cost much less than traditional advertisement and may prove more effective if you can use them properly.

Branding is all about giving a relevant face to your business. More importantly, if you do not add a face to your business, the target market will soon develop one for you and you will have almost nothing to do about that. Once an impression is created, it is very tough to replace it with a new one. Thus, you need to consider developing a brand image from the very first day of launching your product.

How to do that?

The first thing you need to do is to create a diagram or flow chart of how you want your product to be perceived by the target market. At the same time, you need to find out other elements like your target market, where they live, how they want your product to be, how your product is different from your competitors’.

You will also need to find out the best way to reach the target market – evaluate different options such as radio or TV advertisement, POS advertisement, newspaper or magazine advertisement, email advertisement etc.

Once you have developed a flow chart of what you want or how you want to develop your brand, draft a branding strategy accordingly. For example, develop an appropriate logo, color scheme (maintain the same color scheme across the product), a tag line to attract your target market etc.

Do not forget to evaluate how people perceive your brand.

About the Author: Steve McMains is a media professional and writes for different online publications on media and advertising industry. For more information on corporate branding or integrated marketing, he recommends you to visit http://www.brandweek.com.

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Owning any type of online business will strongly benefit from a few SEO techniques. However, everyone and their brother has advice on how to do it. All this ‘expert’ advice can make the simple task of optimizing your site incredibly confusing.

Here are some straightforward answers to the most common SEO questions.

1. What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. A search engine is a tool many internet users use to find sites that are relevant to their needs. The three biggies when it comes to search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are however, hundreds of search engines available to internet users. Search engines work by sending out spiders to crawl through the World Wide Web and gather information. If you have the information they’re looking for, in the places they are looking, they’ll find you and place you in their results when a person is looking for your information.

The task of understanding what search engines are looking for and putting it in the right places on your website and in your content, is the essence of search engine optimization. So now you might be asking…what do search engines look for and where do they look for it? The answer is keywords and links. Keywords in your html coding, keywords on your webpage content, keywords in your content, and the number of incoming links you have to your website.

2. How important is SEO?

Let’s just put it this way. What’s better a few visitors who stumble upon your website or hundreds of visitors that go to your website with the direct intention of learning more or making a purchase?

With more and more people searching and shopping online, getting on the first page or two of the search engine results can mean the difference between keeping your day job and becoming an internet millionaire.

3. What are text links?

Links are just one of the tools you can use to increase your search engine optimization. The more quality links you have, the better your search engine ranking will be. Text links are links that contain only text. Wikipedia is a great place to examine internal text links. The links are contained within a sentence and when a reader clicks on them they are taken to a different page on the same website. The kind of text links you’re looking for will be text links that will take readers from your article, ebook, or web copy to your website.

An excellent tool to generate incoming links is to write copy for online audiences like article directories, blogs, and ezines and insert text links in the copy. Webmasters will link to the content and thus to your site. Additionally, when you allow free reprints of your copy provided the links are maintained, you’re encouraging links to your website.

4. What are link farms and link exchanges?

Search engines don’t accept just any old link. The link has to be from a relevant and quality company. This means you don’t want to participate in link farming. If a search engine suspects your links to be lacking, they’ll actually penalize you. Link farming or link exchanging is essentially the process of exchanging reciprocal links with Web sites in order to increase your search engine ranking. A link farm is a Web page that is nothing more than a page of links to other sites. Stay away from link farms. When you generate a link from another site, it had better be relevant and coming from a real web site.

5. What is duplicate content?

The definition of duplicate content is web pages that contain substantially the same content. Search engines will penalize you for this. How do you avoid duplicate content? Don’t publish the same article in several locations. There are many tools available online to help you re-write your content so that it is 30%, 40%, and even 50% different. However, the best way to avoid duplicate content is to simply write new content.

6. How do I find the right keywords?

There are several steps to finding the most profitable keywords. The first step is to generally do a bit of brainstorming and come up with a list of keywords you think people will use to find your products. The next step is to research supply and demand for those particular keywords. Supply means how many other websites are using those same keywords and demand is how many people are looking for those particular keywords.

The key is to find keywords with high demand and relatively low supply. There are many effective and useful keyword tools to help you find this information and to generate keyword ideas. Once you decide on a few keywords, it may be useful to do a bit of testing before you commit to them.

7. How do I optimize my web pages?

Placing your keywords in the right location is a good start to optimizing your web pages. Search engines look to the headings, subheadings, domain name, and title of your website. They also look in the content on your page and primarily focus on the first paragraph.

Try to get a domain name with your primary keyword included. When you include your keyword in your URL it tells the search engine spiders immediately what your site is about.

Title Tag. Your title tag is the line of text that appears on search engine results pages that acts as a link to your site. This is a crucial element of your webpage as it describes to your visitors what your page is about.

If you view your source code, your title tag will look something like this: <TITLE>Search Engine Optimization Tips</TITLE>

Keep your title tags brief, descriptive, up to date, and keyword rich will help to increase the relevance of your site in the eyes of the search engines, as well as giving your potential visitors a good idea of what they can expect from your site.

Meta Tags have lost their importance to the search engines however it is still helpful to place your keywords in your meta tags. In your source code they look something like this: <META NAME=”description”

8. Do I need to submit my site to the search engines?

The simple answer is – no. Search engine spiders are always out there doing their job and collecting information. Every time you update your website, add content, or change your keywords, the search engines capture the information and record it. However, if you want to be listed on a directory, like the DMOZ Open directory project, then you will need to submit to those.

9. What are spiders?

Search engine spiders are also called web crawlers or bot. They’re basically automated programs which scan websites to provide information to search engines often for the purpose of indexing or ranking them.

10. How does content help my SEO?

Content is one of the best tools to improve your search engine ranking. It is a great place to emphasize keywords, encourage linking to your site, and increase traffic. The key to content is to make sure you’re offering quality content and you’re updating your website and your content frequently. Content can be provided in many forms including:

• Blogs
• Forums and chat rooms
• Articles
• Reviews
• Case studies
• Reports
• How to guides
• Tutorials
• e-books and much more.

About the Author: Jeremy Gislason – Want to know proven ways to dramatically increase membership sales? Want to take membership marketing to a whole new level of overflowing profits? Build high-earning membership sites like a pro by going to http://www.membershipmillionaire.com.

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What does a website need? The simple answer is repeat visitors, this is what successful websites share in common, and this accounts for a major part of their traffic.

Why is this?

Well, experience shows that returning visitors are much easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The whole issue of credibility disappears.

So what do you need to do to keep your visitors coming back and visiting your site?

How about checking out some of the solutions below:

1) You could consider starting a forum, chat room or shout box.

Providing a forum, chat room or shout box, allows your visitors to have a voice where they can share their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them visitors of your site.

Over time this develops into a sense of community and conversions will follow and your visitors will look forward to coming back to your site each and every day.

2) This probably goes without saying, but starting a blog can be a fantastic source for both new and recurring traffic.

Having your own blog is like keeping an online journal, and human beings are curious and thirsty for information. You need to keep your blog frequently updated with your latest news, both business and personal.

You will find that over time more and more people will come back to read your posts and with it you will develop credibility as an authority figure in your niche.

3) How about carrying out polls or surveys?

You will note that so far all the suggestions made have had some form of visitor interaction and conducting polls and surveys is no different. This is one that you should definitely consider adding to your site.

They are a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. It is important that you publish the results of any polls or surveys so that you keep the interest of your visitors to come back and see the results.

4) This is a little bit more innovative, but have you considered the use of puzzles, games and quizzes.

This will provide a yardstick as to how many people are willing to return to your site if you are maintaining their interest through entertainment.

You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) This may appear just plain common sense, but you need to update your site frequently with fresh content if you wish to attract multiple visits.

Although this may appear to be the most likely of strategies it is also the most overlooked with some sites seemingly looking the same for years.

If you want returning visitors to the same message over time that message needs a refresh, a different approach or angle!

Maintaining the same approach continually will have the effect of changing nothing, so don’t be lazy and add new fresh bites of information from time to time to increase your visitor’s interest.

About the Author: Christopher Raine – Are you ready to maximize your sales potential? If you answered “Yes”, find out how you can increase your sales by 40%, even when your visitors are leaving your site! “Yes” you heard me right! Find out how this is possible with your own Virtual Sales Employee.

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A few weeks ago I found myself in the subway of New York City. Posters and billboards from a prominent bank promoted credit card decaled the underground landscape.

These well-crafted advertisements promised ten dollars back for every $100 spent on subway fares. It gave the current economic crisis and recession as the explanation for their incredible generosity and compassion.

Everybody around me seemed thoroughly impressed by this overwhelming gesture of selfless charity; many discussed in earnest how they were planning to sign up for this card to enjoy these charitable savings. It seemed I was the only one, the Christmas Grinch of the crowd, who perceived this advertisement strategy as more cunning and brilliant than selfless and generous. What an ideal time to hook people on yet another credit card, especially with the holiday season already upon us. Obviously the long-term interest this credit card company was anticipating far overshadowed their likely short-term promotional costs.

Indeed it was a cunning and brilliant strategy, much the same, I thought to myself, as Google’s page rank system.

At first glance it seems a very wise, fair and indeed brilliant system for determining positioning within the search ranks. On closer inspection, however, it is even more brilliant and cunning than most are giving it credit.

In the past, creating good, unique and newsworthy content, coupled with intelligent onsite optimization strategies, was at least enough to get your website found. These days are now gone, regardless of what some naïve or misleading SEO experts might still tell you.

Page Rank has now become the single most important factor in having your site found in the organic search results of the leading search engines. Page Rank is determined by the quantity and quality of websites that are linking to yours. Each website link acts as a kind of vote for the site it links to, and passes some of its own page rank to this site. The higher the page rank, and the more relevant the content of the site, the more significant the affect will be.

Since search engine bots cannot view your site in the same way a human views it, this strategy allows user popularity to have a significant affect on the algorithm these search engines are using. The belief is, of course, that the more quality and relevant sites that are voting for yours, the higher the probability that your site is a good one, and therefore deserving of a higher position.

Of course, this system is not perfect, and for obvious reasons, but it is certainly superior to deciding the importance of a site purely on onsite content. The reality is, there are thousands if not million of webmasters who can write unique, quality content. There are even more who know how to optimize this content for the search engines. However, millions of sites cannot be number one for a single keyword or phrase. Page rank must decide the difference.

The problem, however, is that the top search engines have now leaned so far away from onsite optimization, in preference of offsite optimization (i.e. page rank), that you are likely to find all kinds of lousy content and add riddled sites at the top of your searches. Putting a greater importance on links, however, plays significantly in Google’s favour. This is especially true today, as reciprocal and 3-way link exchanges have now been significantly devalued, along with paid links and link directories.

Google’s intent is that links should be entirely organic, occurring naturally when other webmasters like your site enough to add a link to it. This way of achieving links however, can take a very, very long time, as most Internet users do not know that they are supposed to do this. Most Internet users add the sites they like to their favourites, they don’t create a keyword rich link to it from their own highly relevant site. Nevertheless, this is just one of the many ways Google favours older more time-proven sites over newer, get rich quick sites. The fact is, unless the content of your website has just revealed something of tremendous news importance, it could take years before your quality site acquires enough natural, keyword rich links from relevant sites to significantly boost you to the top of the search engines.

The conundrum, however, is that nobody will find your great content, and thereby link to it, unless you are on page one or two for at least one keyword or phrase (one that gets searched for that is). So if you do want to acquire natural one-way links, you pretty much have only one choice. You will have to advertise.

Google now provides the best online advertising available. Not only is it inexpensive, it is targeted towards your keywords.

This means a much higher conversion rate. People will find your product or service when they are looking for it, not when they are looking for something else. And with around 80% of North American searches done on Google, it just wouldn’t make sense to concentrate your efforts anywhere else (unless your loyalty lies elsewhere).

Knowing this, guess who will reap the largest rewards of this new lean towards offsite optimization? The reality is, if you want your internet site to one day make it to the top of Google (and Yahoo and MSN) for an important keyword or phrase, you will have to acquire a substantial number of natural links. Since this could take years, as most webmasters are selfish and don’t link for nothing, and most Internet users don’t know to do this, you are bound to spend a small fortune with Google before your site is able to stand on its own. Of course Google won’t make as much of a profit from you once your site is on the top, but there will be millions of others who will still be vying for this position.

The bottom line is, you will need to spend money if you one day want to make money.

The only question is how much money can you afford to invest? Or should I say gamble, because no matter how much money you spend, there are no guarantees.

The results, of course, are purely organic, and Google’s algorithm can change at any time. Besides, by the time you’re actually on the top, your content and unique features will likely be outdated and not that impressive anymore.

Google insists that you cannot purchase or pay for the organic results located on the left side of the screen. If you are caught purchasing links that are intended to indirectly improve your search engine ranking position, you will either be significantly penalized, or removed from Google entirely. However, the only significant way to increase naturally is to pay for advertising on the right side, so people can actually find your great content and unique features, and provide you with these natural links.

Of course, there are some other ways to promote your site, such as blogging, posting on forums, and creating videos on Youtube, etc. The catch is, however, that if you’re not careful, you will be penalized for spamming (excessively promoting your site where you are not supposed to). This is why most forums these days have the no follow meta tags added to their code. Otherwise, you will just have to get creative in achieving and maintaining high PR links that are relevant and keyword rich.

Unfortunately, if you do find a way to attain these links in any way that Google considers unnatural, it will eventually update its algorithm and ensure you are penalized for your imaginative endeavours.

Personally, I’ve never seen so many people work so hard at what is considered cheating. Couldn’t we at least give them part marks for creativity? After all, you won’t even let them see the marking rubric.

About the Author: Jack Strawman is the cofounder of Late Night Chat and HookUp and Canada Chat and Dating, both sites intended for late night encounters.

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A website is a handy and trendy marketing tool for business. For a good website, the visual web design must be attractive and must be able to grab the attention of a large number of visitors.

Web designing is an art and has to be done with interest and involvement. When done with involvement, the user-friendly feature will automatically get incorporated in the design. Stunning web design with good programming and marketing strategies will greatly increase the visibility of the website to the Internet browsers.

From this introduction it can be easily understood that web design is the key aspect of a website. For designing a user-friendly website here are a few tips which I gained through my experience in web designing. These useful tips, when implemented, will yield good user-friendly web designs.

Here we go.

1). What does the website convey?

Your answer to the question will lead you all the way to a good and meaningful web design. For designing a website, one should have a theme. On getting to know more of what the website is about, as a designer or as a Webmaster, it will be easy for you to design accordingly.

2). Planning for the web design

Planning makes work proceed smoothly. The first step in planning is research. Surf through the web to find sites similar to yours. Do a simple yet meaningful research to understand the pulse of the visitors. On doing so, your first impression will always be the best one.

3). Setting theme and layout

After your research and planning, the vital part of your web design is the collection of assets. The first step will be theme selection and webpage layout. There are personal websites, informational websites, ecommerce websites and service providing websites. It is all in the hands of a designer to select a matching theme to satisfy the need and implement it attractively.

4). Web Page Design

Neat and informative web pages are the most visited pages on the net. To design such a web page, the important elements to be taken note of are the header, footer, text area and the navigational area. Avoid using animated/flashy headers and navigational icons. Use a uniform header and footer to give a professional look to the website. These, when designed with care and when followed, will result in good web design.

5). Site Map and Navigation

In web designing, the term navigation is very much apropos with user-friendly. Navigation within the website should be very clear and easy. Always try to implement normal links for moving around, and avoid animated buttons. The column to the right of the webpage should have good navigational links. The site map is another important and easy way for finding web pages in the website. So, never forget these as these are the principal tips to be remembered while designing.

6). Usage of images and text

Web designing is all about expressing the ideas of the business to people. For it to be a success, use of correct images for communicating the content of the website to the visitors is a must. The text in the webpage must be search engine optimized and must convey the message clearly.

7). Page Size and Download Time

After placing the images, links and the text, the complete page should not exceed 30 KB. This size will ensure that the page is downloaded quickly, within 5 to 6 seconds. This time is crucial time because either it may bring visitors or divert them to another website of the same type.

The above are a few important tips to be considered while designing a website. You can follow them or modify them to suit your need. But the fact is that designing is about presenting the information in an elegant, decorative and user-friendly way.

About the Author: John Williams – Dot Com Infoway Ltd., a professional Web Development Services company delivers web design services for all your needs. They specialize in complete website development solutions with expertise in Web Application Development services to global clientele.

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